HEAR THE IDIOSYNCRATIC SERENADES OF THE HIMALAYAN BEAR
Vue Weekly
By MARY CHRISTA O'KEEFE
‘I’ve toured before, but never to the South or eastern States. I’m in awe of a lot of it—driving on the Bayou, the highway next to a swamp. We stop the van, get out for gas, and whoa, we’re in Louisiana! The context of that, to look around and see this sort of place where rock and western music as we know it today basically came from here … ” Ryan Beattie trails off, searching for the essence of his postcard-ish vignette. “There’s a lot of poverty. I knew it existed, but you see these shacks … ”
The Victoria-based musician and lapsed filmmaker is an elliptical conversationalist, excitedly shuffling through stacks of ideas, images and intentions in his mind, given to thoughtful silences as he burrows into a notion, and equally sudden bursts of communication as he extends earlier avenues of discussion. As befits the art he turned away from, he has a documentarian’s eye, storyteller’s heart, boundless curiosity and appetite for stimulation.
He’s like one big, intense and slightly goofy sensory organ, unleashed on the planet to soak up as much ambient experience as possible and to distill his responses into oddball serenades that house his singular moonlit croon.
Over the course of three epic albums with Chet, the four-piece band he formed with his brother, Beattie’s shown himself to be defiantly restless—each record is an aural missive that takes his fascinations down progressively more interesting byways. Plenty of people throw musical references around, but Beattie harnesses them into wholly novel expression that evokes the soul of his sources—everything from Buddy Holly-ish proto-rock to Mediterranean peasant-folk. Under his solo-ish moniker, Himalayan Bear, he remains lucid, album-oriented and exploratory.
“Himalayan Bear; Chet—I’d like to have them fused but giving them names created this distinction,” Beattie sighs. “It was just easier to have stuff directly involving the band separate from what I was doing alone. It’s one body of work, I think.”
His Himalayan Bear debut, last year’s Lo Lonesome Island, picked up where Chet’s sophomore release, Kau’ai, left off, fusing roots-pop with straight-faced Hawaiian balladry. His complete lack of irony and refusal to belittle his obvious enjoyment of his references heightens the romantic (in the poetic sense; rather than dime-store cheapness) bareness of his idiosyncratically textured creations.
“I ripped off Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Bottle Imp’ on Lo Lonesome,” Beattie chuckles. “I had an infatuation, a nostalgic obsession, with Hawaii, and the beautiful melodies fit in with what I often play.”
His new offering, … attacks the brilliant air, is aesthetically sympathetic and linked to his other work, but the animating idea is entirely different. “Lo Lonesome came out before this one, but I intended this first,” he says. “It’s not Hawaiian at all—more folky, pretty quirky, quite pulled back.”
Indeed, the only outsized thing about … attacks is the length of most songs. The record is relentlessly intimate, a series of mise-en-scènes and somnambulant staggers, like an all-night conversation.
“We recorded at an old bookstore in the middle of night,” Beattie recounts. “I was trying to tell a whole story, but not have a narrative. This one is really about pulling back from that, trying to be minimal again, and using the environment we were recording in. Nothing conscious. The album direction took off with what I had—the instruments and the incredible tone of the room. I wanted the record totally subdued, but concentrated tone-wise and meditation-wise.”
He adds, “It was nice to try to do that. Studios are usually sterile places. You create sound from scratch.”
Yet his mercurial intellect is already elsewhere, perhaps still in the Bayou, communing with the roots of soul and blues and rock. Those influences may percolate in his mind and bewitch his fingers as they caress his guitar. With Beattie, you just never know where his long song is headed next.
|
